Monday, April 14, 2014

Uniform Documentation Policies and Procedures (Part One)

[This is meant to be a series of posts that will illustrate the importance and the process of creating a set of uniform documentation policies and procedures for a large organization that has many physical locations.]

Uniform documentation policies and procedures are vital to any organization.

The creation of documentation is often formatted differently, created
with different tools, are stored in a variety of locations and use inconsistent terms throughout the
organization.

One obvious improvement to the creation and
utilization of documentation includes creating, modeling and using a
style guide throughout the organization.

This style guide should be
created by the departments and approved by management. This will
increase transparency and "buy in."

Another, less obvious
improvement to create a uniform and efficient documentation system
throughout your organization is to have a classification style guide as
well as a writing style guide.

This will ensure that documentation is
stored in the proper location and can be accessed/found easily in times
of need, or for review.

I will talk about two distinct aspects in this post:

1. Creation of standards and procedures

Descriptions of set of content creation tools
Descriptions of Storage tools
Description of content creation tools and storage locations